68: Ditch the Diet: 5 Secrets for Sustainable Weight Loss

If you're ready to finally ditch the diets, for something more sustainable (and that gives better results!), listen up!

When I tell women I lost 65 pounds in my late 40s, their first question is always "How?" And while I could list the diet swaps and workouts, that's not the full story, is it? We both know that when life hits the fan—solo parenting for six weeks, caring for a sick parent, recovering from surgery—the "basics" are the first thing to go. If weight loss were just a simple nutrition plan, you’d have already reached your goal!

The truth is, my lasting success came from going far beyond the basics. It wasn't just about the food and movement.

It was about the profound identity shift and the tools I developed to stay on track when things got hard. It’s what allowed me to stick with my health journey through a hysterectomy, breast cancer, and all the day-to-day chaos that comes with midlife motherhood.

In this episode, I'm pulling back the curtain to share the five most impactful things I did to not only lose 65 pounds, but to keep it off for good. These are the non-negotiable strategies that will help you pull through when life inevitably goes off the rails.

In This Episode:

✅ The ONLY Thing You Need for Long-Term Success: It isn't your meal plan, but learning to be brutally consistent (and hear how I finally taught myself to do it).


✅ The Sneaky Thing Sabatoging Your Efforts: The "bites, licks, and tastes" (BLTs) you're conveniently forgetting to track, and how this simple act of self-honesty can change your results.

✅ Why Your Feelings Are Derailing Your Weight Loss: You MUST recognize your feelings—like resentment or frustration—because they directly drive your results. I’ll explain how this works and how I used a simple framework to stop that cycle.

✅ Stop Looking for the “Quick Fix”: Why those fat burners, peptides, or latest fad diets are actually keeping you stuck, and why consistency over time is the only sustainable path.


Let's ditch the frustration and embrace a new way of approaching your health. I promise, weight loss is possible for you in midlife, but you're going to have to make a few mindset shifts!

Links Mentioned and Ways to Connect:
🥑 Component Cooking for Busy Moms: Check out The Supper Club meal plan membership to see how I cook just 3 nights a week!
📌 Ready to apply the consistency framework to your life? Learn how to do that here!
🙋‍♀️ Work with Me
⭐️ Connect on Social

Transcript

When I tell women that I lost 65 pounds in my late 40s, they usually look at me and say, my gosh, how did you do that? It's a really great question. And honestly, I'm never really sure the best way to answer because I could talk about how I transitioned to an anti-inflammatory diet. I ate more protein, I lifted heavier weights, and I just generally moved more every day. But you already know all of that stuff, right?

you already know what you're supposed to do to lose weight. You really get the basics. So it took more than just the basics for me to finally lose 65 pounds in perimenopause. The basics, they were actually a really good start, but the reality is that when life got challenging and things kind of went off the rails, it was really tough to stick to those basic guidelines of just eating healthier food and moving more. Maybe you can relate to that.

You know, when your life feels chaotic, isn't your health and wellness probably one of the first things to go? So today I want to share with you five different things that I did to lose 65 pounds in my late forties that truly go far beyond the basics. These are the things that really helped me to pull through when life got difficult. Like when I was parenting, solo parenting for six weeks or after a hysterectomy.

or when my dad fell and I had to take care of him while he was in rehab. You'll hear me say this over and over again. If weight loss was as simple as having the right nutrition plan, you would have lost weight by now. The reality is that there's so much more to it than that. And what I discovered on my journey is that it's so much more than just the weight loss. That's really, it's what got me started and I'm sure it's what gets you started.

but it's about who I became and really how my complete identity changed over time is what really allowed me to stick with my journey. So I really hope that these five things today give you just a few more areas to focus on as you work through your own perimenopause weight loss and health journey.

Okay, so the most impactful thing that I did by far was to teach myself how to be consistent. So that's probably not what you were hoping to hear, right? It's really easy for us to lean into this belief that you're a victim to your circumstance or your genetics or your hormones. But if you get really, really honest with yourself, what are you going to see? Like let's look at your food intake, how

consistent are you really? You fully own it when you decide to order a gluten-free bun and no cheese when you're out for dinner and having a burger. But do you fully own the fact that you also had two or three beers at that same dinner? So then when you step on the scale a few days later, you think, my gosh, but I've been eating gluten-free and I've been trying to limit my dairy and I've been watching what I eat. The deal is you're

brain does not want to feel uncomfortable feelings like guilt or shame. So you conveniently forget that you also had those three beers, which unfortunately those three beers can have a significant impact on your weight loss goals.

On my journey, I found that even though I really wanted to believe that I was consistent with tracking my food, I'd actually skipped the small things like a handful of olives or a spoonful of almond butter, or maybe a small cookie or two from Serea's plate. None of these things is inherently bad or unhealthy, but I like to refer to these as BLTs, which stands for bites, licks,

and tastes. So enough of these BLTs and it's really going to add to your caloric intake for the entire day depending on what you're having a taste or a bite of. So you might be wondering how exactly did I teach myself to be more consistent when it came to tracking foods accurately or honestly tracking my workouts and truly owning my choices.

So the way I did this is that I started paying attention to my feelings. Now, believe it or not, your feelings are what drive your results, not the situation that you're in.

If you don't believe me, let's look at this example. Let's look at tracking food. I started to notice that I was actually starting to feel resentful of tracking my food all the time. So if I was just grabbing a few of sereas like tiny cookies or an extra spoonful of almond butter, remember those like BLTs that I was doing, I avoided that feeling of resentment around tracking by not tracking at all. But

Where did that get me? Inconsistent food tracking, which didn't give me an accurate picture of what I was actually eating. And that resulted in me not losing any weight on the scale or maybe even gaining weight. In order for you to be consistent with nutrition and workouts, making healthy choices, you must recognize your feelings, both what comes up when you're frustrated or annoyed and how you feel.

when you're proud and feeling accomplished.

I teach an easy to follow framework for identifying your feelings and then tying it to your results inside of the method, which is my 10 week program for midlife moms, because it's just not enough to have a meal plan or a workout. You have to be consistent if you really want to see the results and that consistency, it all starts with identifying your feelings.

Okay, the next thing I did to lose 65 pounds in midlife was to lean into functional medicine.

I spent so many years going to conventional or like traditional doctors and they just never helped me to feel better or to lose the weight that was packing on. They would just say to me, I don't know, come back in six months. But after doing that same cycle for over three years, I had had enough. So functional medicine, it doesn't give you a pill for your symptom like conventional medicine does. So like a lot of women in, ⁓

perimenopause or menopause, you end up with high cholesterol. And conventional medicine is just gonna give you a statin pill. But functional medicine looks at why you're having that symptom in the first place, like in this case, the high cholesterol. This is what's called identifying the root cause. Because when it comes to weight loss, it's directly correlated to the health of your gut microbiome. Conventional doctors aren't even taught this type

this kind of information in med school. And so they're not gonna bring it up at your appointment. So if you ask them about why you're struggling to lose weight, they're probably just gonna tell you the same answer, eat less, work out more. But functional medicine on the other hand, looks at why aren't you able to lose weight? Do you have underlying inflammation? Do you have an infection or an overgrowth of bacteria? Do you have an imbalance of hormones?

So functional medicine taught me how to really tune into my body to understand what symptoms I was actually having. And then knowing my body better allowed me to ask better questions.

I see this all the time with the women that I work with too. So I had a client and she was really struggling with weight loss and she also had a lot of constipation and bloating. And for her, she kind of figured like, this is the way my body has always been or well, since having kids anyway, she felt. And once she hit perimenopause, she just kind of assumed that it was going to get worse. So she was taking laxatives almost every other day and she never really thought that there was a way out of that.

So I had her meet with a functional practitioner that I recommended. And after doing some testing, she found out that she had a really severe overgrowth of bacteria in her small intestine. So after consistently following a really specific diet for eight weeks, she was able to stop taking the laxatives and she stopped struggling with constipation and she finally started losing weight and has continued to do so. Now, had she just thought, well,

I guess this is just the way it is now. She would have spent the rest of her life feeling pretty miserable, but relying on functional medicine helped her to see that the constipation and this inability to lose weight was actually a symptom of something else. It wasn't her willpower. It wasn't her motivation. There was something going on inside of her body. So now she knows how to clue into the signals that her body is giving her.

and to ask better questions when she does meet up with her functional practitioner.

All right, number three, I really leaned into experimenting and pivoting quickly. So in my weight loss journey, I have tried all of the things, like seriously, all of the things, different diets, working out more, strength training. I even bought fat burners, although I never used them. We'll talk about that in a minute, but...

Trying different things has taught me to understand what actually works in my life as a busy professional mom and what doesn't. So, you know, like working out at 6 30 a.m. at the gym with a class when I have to get my daughter to school at 8 30 a.m. That's just not something that would ever work for me. But working out at home before my daughter gets up. Yeah, that's a great solution for me. That's what I still do every day. I lost

all of my 65 pounds by working out at home. I never went to a gym. So you don't need a gym right away. But experimenting with these different approaches can help you to get really honest about what you will do to lose weight and what you can be consistent with. And then it also helps you to see what is not going to fit into your life. So if an approach to like nutrition or fitness doesn't sync up with your family schedule or your work calendar,

it is just flat out not going to be sustainable. But sometimes you can only figure that out if you experiment and try a few different approaches. Now, with that said, while I encourage women to do some experimenting with nutrition and workouts when they're trying to lose weight, I don't want you to get to the point where the experimenting becomes overwhelming because that is also when you will quit.

literally everything that I teach here on the Family Fork podcast, inside of the method and through my Supper Club membership. It's all based on the experimenting that I have already done.

And so my goal is to share with you what I know exactly what works for weight loss, especially in perimenopause so that you don't have to waste your time with all of the trial and error. Like for example, I tried buying paleo and anti-inflammatory meal plans years ago, but my family didn't always want to eat what I was offering. So after a lot of trial and error, I came up with a method that I call component cooking.

I use this approach, which is so cool, but I use this approach for all of the meal plans that I provide in both the method and inside of the supper club, because I know as a busy professional mom, these are going to save you tons of time and effort and frustration. But knowing that I needed to eat one way and my family needed to eat another way and that I didn't have time for meal prep on the weekends. Well,

All of my experimenting helped me to develop an approach that worked for everyone. And so now that's component cooking. It's the only way that I make my meals and truly it was one of the most helpful tools in my weight loss journey. So you need to do some experimenting and see what works for you. And if you need some support, I have linked to the supper club in the show notes where you can try out that component cooking method and see if it helps you.

Now, speaking of component cooking, the fourth thing that I did to lose 65 pounds in midlife was to prioritize our family meals. Now, I just walked you through how helpful component cooking was for being able to eat what I needed for my health and my weight loss, but still was able to feed my family. But prioritizing our family dinner has actually done so much more than that.

family meals became my time to get creative and have variety.

Part of my weight loss goal was achieved by making basically the same thing every day for breakfast and for lunch. By doing this, it really helped lighten my mental load knowing that I was just gonna have like a filling savory breakfast bowl and then a big salad for lunch. It just made life so much easier. And this is not to say that it's like the same every day. I do a lot of variety by changing up ingredients or sauces, but.

essentially the components or the building blocks were the same for every breakfast and every lunch. But when it came to dinner time, our family dinner time, I actually got really excited to try some new recipes and to test different things out with my family. So I enlisted my family's help in asking them what they thought of different recipes before I ever made them. It was also a great way for me to get my family involved because

They could chop veggies, maybe I could teach somebody how to grill or even just setting the table is helpful. And by sitting down for a family meal together, again, made in this component cooking style, we all had a chance to just talk about our days and connect with what was going on in our lives. And while we were eating what we wanted and needed, the focus actually turned to our conversation, which meant that there was less focus on the food.

At the end of the meal, I would find myself leaving the dinner table feeling really satiated from what I had just eaten, but also feeling really like filled up emotionally, knowing that I had just spent some really quality time with my family. Plus, what a great way to model healthy eating for my daughter now. we would often talk about what we had made for the dinner or the ingredients or how certain foods made us feel.

I mean, talk about a really fun way to be a role model over the food that we're eating. If you're struggling with weight loss, try prioritizing your family dinner. Even if you just get everyone to sit down for like 15 minutes, just get everyone to sit down at the table, eat on proper plates, please stop eating off of paper plates, and then spend that time talking and connecting while you eat your food. I guarantee.

you are going to feel so full in your heart and your stomach.

Finally, the fifth thing that I did in my weight loss journey was to stop looking for a quick fix. Well, mostly anyway. So part of this goes back to number one, which was learning to be consistent with making healthy choices, which.

When I'd made some not so great choices, I of course wanted to look for a quick fix since my choices were making it harder for me to lose weight. but if I'm honest, I'm human just like you. even as a health coach, sometimes I want to look for a quick fix or that slight edge too, but it wasn't always easy and it still isn't easy to be consistent with all of the things

all the time. Just for context, it took me, because people ask this question too, like it took me 19 months to lose 55 pounds. And I did that when I was 45 years old. And then it took me another two and a half months to lose 10 pounds. And I did that when I was 49. So if you add all of that up and do the math, that's about two years total to lose 65 pounds.

two years, it's really hard to be consistent for that long, let alone for the rest of your life. So we often look to these like quick fixes when our weight loss has stalled or when we feel like we're not making any progress at all. I get it, I do.

I have looked for those quick fixes. I've tried supplements, matcha tea, different probiotics. And like I mentioned quickly at the beginning of this episode, in one really weak moment, I actually ordered some fat burners.

And after getting them and reading that warning label, I actually got scared and knew that I probably shouldn't take them. But I leave that bottle of fat burners on my nightstand as a reminder that consistency over time is what is going to help reach our goals, not a quick fix that could actually damage your heart or your health.

But overall, not leaning into quick fixes ultimately helped me to lose that 65 pounds. And yes, it took two years, which might seem like a really long time, but I did it in a way that's healthy and sustainable, and that's what matters. And I've been able to keep it off all that time.

If you are really trying to lose weight in perimenopause, but you are feeling so frustrated with your lack of progress or how long it's taking, I want you to remember these five things. Learn to identify your feelings so that you can be more consistent. Lean into functional medicine, experiment with what works for you, and then keep at it. Prioritize those family meals and stop looking for quick fixes.

I would really, really love for you to drop me a message on Instagram @theashleymalik and let me know which of these tips has been most helpful or has resonated the most with you. I love hearing about where you are in your health and your weight loss journey. And I want to know what information is going to help you move forward towards your goals.

Weight loss, it's possible in midlife, even in perimenopause, but you have to make healthy, sustainable choices in order to make that happen. Being honest with yourself and tuning into your body, asking better questions, that is ultimately going to help you reach your goal. And while the path is not straight and it's typically not fast, just know that weight loss is possible for you.

Be sure to check out the show notes for some of the resources and links that I've mentioned in this episode. I really want to help guide you and cheer you on. And I definitely want to be there to help you celebrate when you hit your weight loss goals.